John Fortescue

Fortescue, John

Born circa 1394; died circa 1476. English jurist, political thinker, and statesman.

In 1442, Fortescue became chief justice of the King’s Bench. In 1460 he was made lord chancellor. At the beginning of the War of the Roses (1455–85), Fortescue sided with the house of Lancaster. In 1461, after the Lancastrians had suffered a defeat, he fled from England. Upon his return in 1471, Fortescue supported the house of York.

Fortescue’s political concepts constitute a transitional link between the ideology of the class-structured monarchy and the doctrine of absolutism. He held that the state should be governed by the monarch in agreement with Parliament. At the same time, Fortescue proposed a number of political measures aimed at increasing the real power of the king and converting the class-representational institutions from a means of controlling and limiting the king to a means of strengthening royal power.

Sobecki convincingly argues his central thesis that a unique common law vernacular legal culture was present in England in this period, which was not limited to the works of John Fortescue, St German, and John Rastell.

Between 1468 and 1471, Sir John Fortescue, appointed Lord Chancellor by the Lancastrian government in exile, instructed the young Prince of Wales, Edward, the son of Henry VI, on the state of things as they were then and how he could improve on them when he was restored to his rightful place and became king.

In the last major division of the work Blythe turns to the influence of medieval mixed constitutionalism on thinkers such as the concfliarists, the Englishman John Fortescue, and the early republicans of Northern Italy, such as Contarini, Bruni, and Savonarola.

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